'Three decades as a doctor - patients dying, succumbing to Covid and the unfolding NHS crisis has made me ill'

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

David Oliver is an experienced NHS consultant physician and medical writer from Manchester. Now working in the South East, he has looked after Covid wards and patients for many months over the past two years.He also writes a weekly column in the British Medical Journal. Here he shares his perspective with the Manchester Evening News - revealing that after more than two years working at the centre of the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by the current crisis of unprecedented demand on a hamstrung system, he has had to be signed off work sick. And the heavy toll of the relentless pressure on those who hold up the NHS is far from unique to him, says the doctor. READ MORE:Patient waits 'six hours' in ambulance as '100 people fit for discharge stuck in hospital beds' during paramedic's 'worst shift ever' I rarely write about my personal experiences, but practising medicine during the Covid pandemic has finally given me the motivation.

I’m just one of hundreds of thousands of clinical and care staff who have lived through it all, and my story is no more important than anyone else’s.

But I’d still like to tell it. I came into the pandemic already tired from three decades as an NHS doctor working on big, busy hospital wards and the acute medical take, combining it all with many external national roles.

Ideally, I wanted a break from medicine. I’d seen the reports from China, northern Italy, and the US about the impact of Covid.